“I was born in February 1934 when Spain was still a Republic,” Fausto Canales Bermejo tells Tribune. At the outbreak of the country’s civil war, two years later, his hometown in rural Ávila fell to rebel fascist forces, who unleashed a wave of terror across the surrounding region. “The ten victims from our town all belonged to the UGT trade union and the local Socialist Party [PSOE] branch. They were taken from their homes, disappeared, and then shot. My father was one of them.”

After his retirement in 1999, Fausto began to search for the remains of his father, just one of the estimated 114,000 victims of Francoism still buried in unmarked graves across Spain. “There was no written documentation, no paper trail,” he explains. But slowly piecing together the evidence over the subsequent years, Fausto confirmed that his father’s body had been moved in 1959 to one of the crypts of the Valley of the Fallen monument outside Madrid, which for decades served as dictator Francisco Franco’s mausoleum.

Built high in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range with the slave labor of Republican prisoners of war, the vast shrine glorifying Franco’s victory still houses the remains of nearly thirty-four thousand people who died in the civil war, including thousands of unidentified bodies taken from Republican mass graves without their families’ consent.